How many farmers for a farm?

[Mezisophon]

I tried to pay some attention if my (equally big) farms of the same crop-type would produce different amounts of food if I had four farmers on them instead of two. But that didn't seem to be the case. So is there a point in having up to four farmers on a single farm at all? How many should you have?

[Hat8]

Max sized farms with the most people working possible seems to be the most efficient way of doing things, especially if their homes are near the farm.

People aren't idle and they end up working right till winter unless they finish early.

[ebrumby]

If you use the max size and max workers, you may be overstaffing the field. Not good when you are trying to get a town started. The size calculator at BanishedInfo.com give you the best general information about size and number of workers. https://banishedinfo.com/tools/size-calculator An 11x11 crop field with one farmer is a great size to use. I do find that I can increase the size of orchards. One 14x14 orchard with 1 farmer (mild climate) will produce about 1100 fruit!

[Hat8]

Originally posted by ebrumby:

If you use the max size and max workers, you may be overstaffing the field. Not good when you are trying to get a town started. The size calculator at BanishedInfo.com give you the best general information about size and number of workers. https://banishedinfo.com/tools/size-calculator An 11x11 crop field with one farmer is a great size to use. I do find that I can increase the size of orchards. One 14x14 orchard with 1 farmer (mild climate) will produce about 1100 fruit!

I usually play on harsh.

Only way to get it all planted and it all (or most) harvested.

[blueoriontiger]

If I recall back on Reddit a few years back, the max efficiency for 1 farmer was a 4x4 field. So 4 people per a 15x15 plot is the best, or if you're a stickler do numerous 4x4 plots.

[ebrumby]

Good grief - a 4 x 4 plot would be such a waste of labor!!! That may be the minimum size but it isn't the optimum.

[Hat8]

Originally posted by blueoriontiger:

If I recall back on Reddit a few years back, the max efficiency for 1 farmer was a 4x4 field. So 4 people per a 15x15 plot is the best, or if you're a stickler do numerous 4x4 plots.

Reddit provides horrible advice I guess. Farmers picking away at the field after the crops been planted greatly increases the yield.

[ebrumby]

One of the things you can do to see what works best in your town, considering the climate you picked is to create 3 different fields. One 11 x 11 with one farmer - sort of the "standard", one that's smaller with one worker (I hear 9x9 is good with harsh climates but you can go smaller) and one that is 15x15 with 4 workers. If you use DeBug, it is easy to create a map just to experiment on - you can use the same map/climate settings without messing up your current game.

[Claybot]

1 farmer per 11x11 plot but once your town gets alot larger you will need to increase it 2 per 11x11. And by alot larger I mean 4000+. For some reason only having 1 farmer they begin to leave crops on the field regardless of limits, barns, roads, houses etc etc. But by that time you will have 500-600 labours with not much to do and its easy to allocate more farmers.
Same applies to your orchards.

[mbutton15]

Originally posted by ebrumby:

One 14x14 orchard with 1 farmer (mild climate) will produce about 1100 fruit!

I'm gonna assume 14x14 is a typo. Any orchard should be an odd number wide as can be seen from the tool size calculator link you provided.
Then it depends what you are trying to achieve. If you're going for max output per person then go for 15x13 as you get 5 rows of trees and 1 worker producing 1300 food. If you're going for max output per square then go for three 15x4 orchards with 1 worker per orchard producing 520 food. That is combined total size of 15x12 (6 rows of trees) and you get 1560, so more food but from 3 workers.

[ebrumby]

Thanks mbutton15 (fixed it!). You're absolutely right. I picked 14x14 out ot the air while play testing a mod added to vanilla. You can tell I hardly ever play vanilla. I should have checked! (The mod I was testing is the CC Orchard Foresters and I was trying to use up a large area with one farmer to compare the two. Even my inefficiently sized Regular orchard produced more, but with the Orchard Forester you get to grow any fruit/nut tree you want without paying for seeds.)

[mbutton15]

Originally posted by ebrumby:

Thanks mbutton14.

Haha, 14 on the brain !!

[Fenris]

The size calculator as mentioned earlier is a good tool. I start out with 11x11 plots surrounding a barn in what I think of as my survival phase (at the start of the game when I'm only concentrating on enough food, firewood, and shelter to survive). When I get to my town planning phase I go with 8x15 because I think it looks nicer when you have a lot of fields and 8x15 only produces 7 less food per season. Regardless, I only ever use 1 farmer per field and get 100% growth and harvest each season.

When you can pruduce warmer clothes that will help keep your citizens working longer before needing to warm up, and since the weather is getting colder around harvest time that should help depending on your game settings.

Another thing to try is to disable "pick up" and let your laborers pick up the crops. In late summer disable or pause anything your laborers are doing, so by harvest time they are free to pick up crops. As each farmer finishes pulling up thier crops they act as a laborer as well and also start to pick up food laying on the fields. So basically it steam rolls with more and more people picking up crops until they are all picked up. This helps a lot when the AI decides to walk past 2 nearly empty barns to put crops in one farther away :/

And some crops just wont grow well depending on your climate. In the game I'm playing now I got rid of my squash fields because they produced 200-300 less food per year than my other crops.